Languages of science

Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to the science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two meanings are different, since the first describes a distinct prose in a given language (i.e., scientific writing), while the second describes which languages are used in mainstream science.

Until the 19th century, classical languages—such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Malay and Classical Chinese—were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for international scientific communication. A combination of structural factors, the emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of colonization entailed the global use of three European national languages: French, German, and English. Yet new languages of science, such as Russian and Italian, had started to emerge by the end of the 19th century—to the point that international scientific organizations began promoting the use of constructed languages such as Esperanto as a non-national global standard.

After the First World War, English gradually outpaced French and German; it became the leading language of science, but not the only international standard. Research in the Soviet Union (USSR) rapidly expanded in the years after the Second World War, and access to Russian journals became a major policy issue in the United States, prompting the early development of machine translation. In the last decades of the 20th century, an increasing number of scientific publications were written primarily in English, in part due to the preeminence of English-speaking scientific infrastructure, indexes, and metrics such as the Science Citation Index. Local languages remain largely relevant for science in major countries and world regions such as China, Latin America, and Indonesia. Disciplines and fields of study with a significant degree of public engagement—such as social sciences, environmental studies, and medicine—have also maintained the relevance of local languages.

The development of open science has revived the debate over linguistic diversity in science, as social and local impact has become an important objective of open science infrastructure and platforms. In 2019, 120 international research organizations cosigned the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication; they also called for supporting multilingualism and the development of an "infrastructure of scholarly communication in national languages". In 2021, UNESCO's Recommendation for Open Science included "linguistic diversity" as one of the core features of open science, since this diversity aims to "make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone." In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki Initiative.